Jo Clayton - Shadow of the Warmaster

Incivility increased. City fought Grassland with fists and worse. Hordar are not violent, they are much like my folk in that, but there is a limit beyond which you cannot push them, especially youngers unseasoned by age and learning, the unsteady youngers who, looking forward, see only a bleakness growing worse.

Incivility was bred in the bare and boring shelters that would never be homes, where Duzzulka youngers were left alone to pass the days however they could. It would not happen to the least and poorest of the Morze Bahar, I take pride in that; plenty and poverty are shared alike, Morz to Morz, and children are hard won, a joyful blessing. When KariniKarm bore my son and daughter, I swam with her and stayed with her to care for them until they could leave the water and walk upon the land, breathing the thick wet air into new soft lungs. A full year I stayed with her and them, leaving work, weaving joy into the wide communal song.

Schooling on this world is Family business; where the families cannot do it, the children are unschooled; when their parents work all day and half the night for a meager sum that barely keeps them fed and clothed, how are they to teach their children to read and write and figure? If they never learned themselves, how are they to teach? Grasslander youngers and city youngers alike, they are ignorant and unlettered, they are wasted. Is there no one who understands this? Is there no one out there who will find a cure for this obscenity?

He put the knitting down and rested fists on it, gazed grimly into the lens, his stare an accusation. When he spoke, the gravelly voice was hard with scorn.

Is it so strange, so unexpected that these so abandoned children melded in gangs and learned city ways in city streets? Is it so strange that they met there gangs of city poor, youngers who heard their elders cursing the grasslanders who stole their jobs, is it so strange they fought, these children of the streets? Is it so strange they learned to rage at landlords and city wards and most of all at the Huvved Fehz? Is it so strange for youngers looking at the struggles of their kin and the slow slipping of their elders’ lives, is it so strange that they are filled with rage at everyone and everything, that they covet and seize what they cannot hope to earn, that they destroy what they cannot hope to seize? Is it so strange that these youngers call themselves inklins which means the unremembered, that they come to despise themselves as failures and worthless and turn that despite against the world?

He stopped talking, pressed his fingertips against his eyes. For over a minute he sat very still, his dark leathery skin twitching in several places. When he spoke he had put aside his agitation, his voice was mild again.

They are not stupid, these inklins, only unlearned; some are very clever indeed. It was an inklin who made the first yizzy. A boy in gul Mei, or sometimes the story says gul Brindar, or sometimes gul Samlikkan, a boy dreamed of flying, but lacked the guildfee for his training. So he stole yoss pods and bundled them in a bag net which also he stole and tied the net to a broomstick and strapped a minimotor (which, of course, he stole) to that stick. And he flew.

He leaned toward the lens, his face intent, his eyes glowing, as if he wanted to force his listeners to understand what he was saying.

The idea also flew. West to east, east to west, within the year inklins in all parts of the Littoral were building yizzies for themselves. Within two years inklin gangs were having skyfights; at first they used sticks to bang away at each other, then they made spears, then another clever inklin, some say it was a girl tired of getting banged about, discovered how to spray fire from a hose. The gas inside yoss pods is hydrogen, remember. There were mornings when the city was full of charred flesh and the screams of the not quite dead.

Even before I left, it was not only inklin flesh that burned. Sometimes the yizzy inklins drop fire on Houses and factories and when they feel like it, on the Fekkris; a Huvved in the street after dark is a target whenever inklins fly. The Fehdaz sends slaves to clean up when the mess is really bad and he does not want the extent of it to make the whisper circuit.

Incivility increases. The cities are burning bit by bit.

What the inklins do not destroy the Huvved will; already they see poor folk as sharks circling them ready to attack, the time will come when they see every Hordar poor or not as enemy, when the only easing of their terror will come when there’s no one left for them to fear. I see the time coming when the Warmaster will glide from city to city melting cities into bedrock slag.

I am uncomfortable here away from the ocean. I go to the Sea Farms; if they are fortunate, they will survive the Burning. Should the Huvved go entirely mad, they can scatter their barges and wait out the storm. May the data flow freely for you, Aslan A-tow-a-she, may your days be filled with meaning.

“Does this answer that question of yours, Hayal Halak?”

“I knew all that, doctori-yabass.”

“If you knew, why did you ask?”

“You sound very serious today, doctori-yabass.”

“Boring, you mean.”

“Oh no, we’d never say that. Go on, tell us more. That was, not boring, no, depressing. Tell us something positive. Tell us about the rebels that win, doctori-yabass.”

“I’m going to be boring again, and depressing, but listen to me anyway. The rebels that pull it off, they’ve done the easiest part. War simplifies things, choices are stark. After the war’s over, well, life gets at them, chews them down. People don’t change, not really. There are no instant angels. Ideology is for arguing about in bars, it’s hopeless as a guide for government. Right thinking just does not do it, backsliding seems to be a necessary condition for intelligence. If the rebels who survive and are running things haven’t allowed for that, there’s fury and frustration and repression and things end up the way they were before, or worse.”

“And if they allow for frailty, doctori-yabass?”

“With a little luck and a lot of good will, they go on, sometimes things get better, sometimes worse.”

“Worse for whom, doctori-yabass?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

“A question you have not answered, doctori-yabass.”

“A question I don’t have to answer. A question I can’t answer. It’s all yours, young Hordar.”

As she went through her ordinary round, she chewed over what the ears told her and tried to decide what she wanted to do. She had a choice. She could stay here and be quite comfortable; she could pretend she didn’t know what was happening, she could teach her seminars, act as consultant to the Council, flake everything that happened as a record of a rebellion in progress, an opportunity few of her colleagues had had. It was the sensible thing to do, wasn’t it? It was adolescent claptrap, this sense that she would be somehow debased if she let the Hordar and Elmas Ofka hold her hostage, trick her mother. Four days. It wasn’t much time. Four days to get ready to be at that meeting. Or not. That night, she talked with Churri and Xalloor, her mind still unsettled, her inclination to go not much stronger than her inclination to stay.

Churri rested his head in Xalloor’s lap, crossed his legs at the ankle. “Trouble, yah,” he said. “Won’t last. If you go, Council isn’t going to tell anyone what you did, it’d make them look bad. Incompetent. No polit’s going to let that idea get around if he can help it.”

Chilled by a touch of the ashgrays, Aslan watched the fire crawl over the coals and fought to keep her pride intact. Xalloor’s decision to stay behind with Churri left her feeling very alone and more than a little let down. After a minute she said, “Wouldn’t stop them dropping you and Xalloor down a hole and pushing a ton of rock on you.”